Dear Bernard

At the age of 3 years and 8 months, you stopped breastfeeding. Over the last months there have been odd nights when you’ve gone to bed without that one feed that helps you get off to sleep, because I’ve been out teaching or something. Gradually the supply of milk has dwindled to nothing; you say it’s been like that for a while now.

We talked about how my body doesn’t make milk anymore because your body doesn’t need it. I said I understood that you do still need the cuddles, and we’re having a cuddly bedtime story instead. You said my dressing gown is very snuggly.

I don’t know whether it’s a good or bad thing that this happened just before I go away for a training weekend, and will miss you for three bedtimes in a row, the longest we’ve ever been apart. I know you are better at going to sleep for daddy when I’m not here, and you’re old enough to understand that, just like the Owl Babies’ mother, I will always come back (you do think a lot).

Breastfeeding you has changed my life.

When I meet mums-to-be, I remember my pregnant self and my determined focus on breastmilk, the product. I simply had no expectation of the process. No experience, no understanding, no conception of what it was like to hold a baby in my arms and feed him from my body. I knew that not all mums manage to breastfeed, and assumed that they just didn’t want it enough. That’s not true, by the way.

You and me, we didn’t find it easy at first. We found it desperately, devastatingly difficult. We were a mess, but lots of people helped us, and eventually it resolved itself, somehow. I can remember setting a date to stop by if it didn’t get any better (which I think would have been about 16 weeks, but I’m not really sure). Your dad said he had always thought we would just breastfeed for a year and never need formula; he was very matter-of-fact about it, and I was quite taken aback at the time. (Usually, men say things like whatever decision you want to make, I’ll support you, which is incredibly unhelpful).

Anyway, the date passed without me noticing, just like your colic disappeared without me noticing; and one morning I observed that there was some sort of pattern to our days, and neither of us was crying quite so often. It was like we’d been struggling along against the current, and finally emerged into calm water.

At six months I decided you would start stopping. I needed you to take a bottle when I went back to work, so that’s what you would do. I still had a lot to learn about babies and their personal timetables. You didn’t want to eat solid food, you wouldn’t drink from a bottle or a cup, and you certainly weren’t interested in stopping breastfeeding. We wasted an entire box of formula, I went back to work, and you obstinately waited until I came home and then fed pretty much constantly until I went back out again. Over and over again, I realise that life is much easier for all of us if I don’t try to impose adult rhythms on you, constructs and expectations that are meaningless to you. Sometimes it’s hard to see the world from your perspective, but when I do, it makes a surprising amount of sense.

You were 8 months old when I started training as a breastfeeding counsellor. As my tutor said, already statistically insignificant. Breastfeeding by then was my most powerful parenting tool, and one of the few ways I had to get you off to sleep. The more I learned about it, the happier I was to keep on doing it. I didn’t plan this from the start; we just gradually evolved into a breastfeeding pair who were in it for the full term. Or possibly, I evolved, and you were always that way inclined.

There are some memorable moments that I want to record here for you.

At one point during those first difficult weeks, I went to see a LLL leader who sat with me so patiently, and talked to me about getting the position right and waiting for you to open your mouth properly wide. That was our first non-painful feed, and you came off the breast drunken and sated. Although we still had a lot of pain over the next few weeks, just knowing that was possible kept me going.

Hot nights sleeping with you on the spare bed at our old house, you feeding all night, me giving up on the nipple shields because it was too much hassle to sterilise them every time you took a break.

My stepdad parking himself on the sofa for about a week, just after you were born, and saying that lad loves his groceries, doesn’t he? every time I fed you.

Feeding you on the beach in Cornwall, under a sarong, on a sandcastle island made by Pete. At 14 months, that may have been the last time I fed you in public.

A couple of times you’ve had stomach bugs, and couldn’t eat anything. Milk was the only thing you could keep down. Goodness knows what I’ll give you next time.

Once you fell over and banged your knee, and mama milk was the only thing that would help. Afterwards you told me that when you drink it, it goes down into your legs to make them better. You also once told me that milk comes from cows, and I drink it with my head, and it goes into you.

We may never talk about it again. You seem pretty sanguine about the whole thing, and I’m kind of glad it’s happened in this low-key way. Thank you for the experience.

Mama.